Marketing budgets revised up at record rate as online ads boom

Oliver Smith is a senior reporter at The Memo, an online publication curious about the future of technology. He was formerly a reporter at City A.M.

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MARKETING budgets have been revised upwards for the three months to the end of September at a record rate, according to an influential survey.

A net balance of 12.3 per cent of firms upped their budgets during the third quarter, compared to just 7.3 per cent for the second quarter, according to The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Bellwether survey.

The upbeat report predicts a 2.4 per cent increase in marketing spend for 2013 overall – lifted by an 11.7 per cent increase in online advertising – and a 3.6 per cent growth in 2014.

“The increased appetite to spend on advertising and marketing is being fuelled by a surge in business optimism, with firms seeing their financial prospects to be the brightest for at least eight years,” said chief economist at Markit and author of the report Chris Williams.

IPA’s findings contradict Nielsen’s advertising report on Tuesday which reported a 2.3 per cent fall in advertising for the first half of 2013. However the report failed to include the boom in UK online advertising. The IPA Bellwether report is based on a survey of around 300 UK-based firms that provide quarterly information on marketing.